FWIW, I don't disagree. And I'm down with educating women, providing birth control and reducing religious influence just for their own sakes, so it's not the solution is even a bitter pill to swallow.

But unless we acheive a worldwide "negative" birth rate, that's not actually going to REDUCE the population as the thread title seems to believe we must. It'll just mean that we're INCREASING it slower.

Without immigration Canda's population would be shrinking without having to kill anyone off. When women are given options they choose to have fewer children and are better able to care for the ones they have.

Yes, actually, there are a number of secular NGOs doing work in that field. Plan (formerly Foster Parents Plan) has been active for decades, and Oxfam as well. UNICEF, too. The more money diverted from religious groups to secular, the faster that changes.

the way the Gecko's talk here no one is doing anything there and it's all up to them.

i'm not big on donating out of your community or country in the first place so haven't given a dime or time to the Geckos.

did some searching last night on all things Zimbabwe and i take even more exception to them now. the Zimbabwe government is going to give 10 billion dollars compensation to the white farmers whose property was taken back. if Zimbabweans are giving billions away to racist rich white farmers why do charitable organizations even need to be there?

If they're religious orgs, or missionaries (especially the charismatic protestant sects), the primary goal is to win souls for Jesus. They care about little else.

Not sure what you mean by Geckos. I've supported Plan Canada in their work in both South America and northern Africa, especially initiatives to send girls to school instead of them being married off young. But also projects that bring clean water and other infrastructure that needs to be in place for better standards of living, and consequently more focus on education.

I wouldn't support them, personally. The idea of getting more geckos for kids to sell? Just weird. Not much long-range planning, and they're not very up front about the role "ministry" plays in the whole scheme. Reads like a bit of a scam to me, and certainly not comparable to the organziations I've listed above. Red flags are that projects are vague, no financial information, not even specific communities where they're operating listed. The ministry org they're affiliated with is definitely evangelical.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, women with an unmet need for contraception account for 80% of unintended pregnancies throughout the globe, and 22 million women will have unsafe abortions each year. What's more, complications from pregnancy and childbirth remain a leading cause of death among women of reproductive age, claiming 800 lives every day. Many of these deaths, 99% of which occur in developing countries, could be prevented if women had access to contraception and reproductive health services. ...

It's all about the numbers. As if these stark statistics weren't reason enough to make birth control available for $1, there's an economic argument too.

Population Action International reports that for every $1 spent on family planning, we save $4 in other areas, including education, public health, water and sanitation. Plus, women who have access to contraception make roughly 40% more than those who don't, paving the way for greater economic success that benefits families and communities at large.

And the problem is getting worse. Between 2003 and 2012, the total number of women in need of birth control because they wanted to avoid pregnancy increased from 716 million to 867 million — and most of that growth was among women in the 69 poorest countries, where birth control is already more difficult to come by. About 222 million women in developing countries want to use birth control but aren’t currently able to access a modern contraceptive method, and nearly three quarters of those women live in the world’s poorest countries.